Have movie budgets been stabilizing?

I think it was more likely due to the fact that the DVD boom came to an end. Ten years ago revenue from the DVD would regularly eclipse revenue from the box office so it changed the whole equation of profitability i.e. films wouldn't have to break even until they hit the home market. These days the DVD sales have more than halved, and while there has been significant international market growth it didn't fully compensate for the shortfall in DVD sales. As a result profit margins have shrunk and budgets have stagnated.

I agree with the burst of the dvd bubbles making people cautious, the risk was really small around 2006, spider man 3 had a net production cost of 300 million, not much lower than those giant assemble avengers movie.

Spider man 3 generated over 500 million to the studio (not in gross sales, the part that went to the studio) in dvd and tv gross revenue, I doubt movie do that today outside say Star wars.

To give an idea, around 2006 some genre of studio movie turned small profit without doing 1.5 time their budget at the box office.

I have a hunch that the ones that cost significantly more than that get artificially adjusted down to save face. But that's just me.

You could be right, or the build some hugely successful narrative like Marvel seem to do.

We have little access to actual cost and when we do have some rough view via tax credit or a leak, it tend to be much higher than advertised.

I always associated the ballooning of budgets with the massive increase of CGI usage in films starting in the mid-2000's. And I've associated the leveling of budgets to the fact that you can only put so much CGI into a film. Also, I figured that using CGI may have gotten slightly cheaper over the past few years. When it's used so much, studios are bound to look for ways to cut costs.

You have also had a case of quite a few films that did not flop but barely broke even or made only a small profit that would have made a nice profit for the studio if they had just cost 50 million dollars less.

I always associated the ballooning of budgets with the massive increase of CGI usage in films starting in the mid-2000's.

I was always under the impression that, in theory, CGI for the last decade was being used as a cost saving measure. After all, the old line about how CGI was making it possible to do things that were impossible x years ago seemed to die with the 1990's. I mean, once Cameron had his liquid metal robot, Spielberg had dinosaurs, and Lucas made a Star Wars film that wasn't corridors, quarries, forests and sand, and it was being used to have Tom Cruise jump down chimneys, and the like, the wow factor really seemed to dissipate.

Anyway, yes, in theory, having, say, a CGI representation of Spider-Man fighting Doctor Octopus on a clock tower saves time, and, by extension, money, because you don't have to take time to shoot the scene, and however long that will take (not the best example - I know there are live-action shots in the fight I refer to). The reality seems to be that CGI tends to get used as a hurried afterthought, quickly knocked out for the film to be ready on time, which, at best, yanks the budget up by millions, and, and worst, yanks the budget up, and looks rubbish.

Shut it, Love Actually! Do you want me to hole punch your face?

The problem with CGi is always time. You can make a film as filled with CGi FX as Ender's Game with 941 FX shots, many incredibly complex, for around $110m if you schedule enough time for post production, but most tentpole pictures are in a race to meet the release date and will usually end up hiring dozens of FX companies working overtime, which gets into huge labour costs (not to mention the additional computer output needed for rendering and storage space). And those kinds of costs are incurred in every other aspect of production when you're racing to meet a date, from script doctors to drivers. Trying to avoid those kind of overruns after the budget for At World's End ballooned so much is one reason why Disney scheduled nearly two years for post-production on Dead Men Tell No Tales (it shot back at the beginning of 2015).

A good mythbusting article on CGi costs can be found here:

http://effectscorner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/why-do-visual-effects-costs-so-much.html#.WGUBtZVvjIU

Of course there are always absurd overindulgences with CGi, like David Fincher hiring hundreds of VFX staff for things that could be done much, much cheaper 'for real' because he wanted to maintain absolute control of almost every shot (and creating a new computer program that created CGi snow where every snowflake was different took that to ever more heights of pointlessness), and the replacement of photographic window backdrops in office sets or backprojection (or simple camera mounts in travelling cars) with CGi greenscreen work has become increasingly prevalent, racking up costs (and a lot of CGi window shots for conversations in moving cars are among the most obviously fake effects going these days: it's primarily to allow the director to directly interact with the cast rather than rely on a remote control camera and asking the actors if they thought the take was any good, but it nearly always ends up looking faker than backprojection).


"Security - release the badgers."